3 Tips for Involving Customers With Your Brand

The Challenge: Companies need to involve customers with their brand by providing emotional connections that drive engagement and purchases.

Here are 3 tips to help you achieve greater brand engagement.

Tip #1: Customers project how they see themselves in your brand attributes.

In an, E-Score study on the Rankings of America’s Top Brands, it was noted that, “a… brand’s attributes and personality can be an extension of how the consumer wants to represent [themselves] and connects to what they expect to achieve from a product or service.”

Tip #2: A purchase is a viewed as a form of self-expression by consumers.

In a study from University of Geneva on Brand Value and the Respective Role of Brand Sensitivity, Situational Involvement and Enduring Involvement it concluded that there is a predominant role in how a customer views their self-expression as it relates to a brand purchase;

• Interaction is a predictor of purchase intent.

• Customers’ situational involvement (linked with anticipated usage) may have a higher impact on the brand purchase intention than the actual perceived value of the product.

Tip #3: There has to be an emotional component to engagement in order for involvement to take place.

It was noted in the International Review of Management and Business Research study, “Investigating the Role of Brand in Forming the Consumer Involvement” that in order to understand consumers’ behavior, knowing the structure of consumer involvement is highly important

• Brand reputation, loyalty, awareness popularity, and perceived quality all have a significant correlation with consumer involvement.

Online retailer, ModCloth has put these key facts into action by developing a customer base that is highly engaged and involved. They have come up with unique strategies for turning customer insights into innovative website features and relevant content;

• CEO Eric Kroger had this to say regarding customer involvement, “Our vision and where we believe the industry is heading is retailers who align behind distinct communities of customers, and those retailers understand those customers better than any other retailer.”

• From the moment that a customer arrives on the site they are invited to become a part of the ModCloth Community.

• ModCloth’s “selfie” gallery on their App (featuring shoppers wearing the company’s clothes) has increased in terms of involvement by 60 percent since it was launched.

• The company announced that it has surpassed  $100 million in annual revenue last year—well over 40% growth year over year—and it largely attributes this success to a focus on the customer and its fostering of a highly involved customer community.

3 Key Takeaways from the strategies ModCloth uses to involve customers:

• Individualized product recommendations based on actual visits and viewed items.

• To strengthen the connections, when shoppers arrive on site from social networks, the retailer displays the product or promotion that prompted the click, while also introducing these visitors to its overall brand. 

• The company makes sure it presents customers with personalized, yet fresh, relevant products and shopping features on every visit to give them a reason to keep coming back.

Coke’s 7 Smart Social Media Rules for Success

The Challenge: How has Coke thrived in a social media world, ranking as the world’s most valuable brand and attracting the biggest Facebook fan base? Learn from their 7 Social Media Rules for Success.

Across all the Voice of Customer research conducted in 2012 by our firm, Ernan Roman Direct Marketing, there has been one consistent finding: consumers have shifted from being passive recipients of ‘push’ marketing/advertising, to selecting companies which engage, listen to, and act on, input from customers and prospects.

Few have done this better than Coca Cola. Born in the 19th Century, few brands have adapted better to the new media conditions of the 21st. It now ranks as the most valuable brand in the world and the most followed on Facebook.

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In a recent interview with Fortune, Coke SVP of Integrated Marketing, Wendy Clark lists seven rules for success in social media:

1. “The #1 thing we think about is being shareworthy in everything we do,” says Clark. “If we do our job well of developing useful, compelling, interesting and shareworthy content, our fans become our sales force for us.”

2. “Listen. Then respond authentically and humanly… There are more than 15,000 tweets everyday on brand Coca-Cola; any that are questions, we answer. We have to. Consumers expect that we’re listening and responding.” Clark strives to achieve a Flawsome experience: “You have to be awesome with your flaws, the things that aren’t perfect. You want to be human, to speak like a human and act like a human.”

3. “Think big. Start small. Scale fast.” Coke continually innovates, but it runs small tests before launching globally, analyzing results for learnings. “Because we’re built for scale and if we don’t get better at testing, learning and then scaling, we have the potential of scaling the wrong thing perfectly.”

4. “Social is not a silver bullet. But social can make everything else better… We think in terms of ideas and campaigns that are social (share-worthy) at their core and then we think about how we can amplify the ideas and campaigns.” Social works together with other media but does not replace them.

5. “Content is the new currency… The world is not suffering from lack of content. With this in mind, content creation has to be useful, interesting, important, shareworthy.”

6. “We might be shepherds, stewards and guardians of our brands, but we no longer control them.”

7. “Think of your constituents as storytellers… 10-20% of the content and conversation on our brands comes from us. The other 80%+ comes from others.”

Coke’s Results:

1. World’s #1 brand.

2. Coke: 56.8 million fans on Facebook (#1); more than half a million fans talking about content per day.

3. Per Wendy Clark: Coke’s social media fans are twice as likely to be a consumer and 10x as likely to purchase Coke as nonfans.